There was, as those of us in eastern Massachusetts know, quite a band of rain and hail that crossed through yesterday afternoon, which might be why the leader of our writers’ group last night had puddles on the brain. For one writing prompt, we were challenged to use the words ‘middle, addle, and puddle’ in a scene. My brain went from Beatrix Potter’s oft-confused Jemima Puddleduck to ee cummings’ “puddle-wonderful,” and this is what happened next.
Portrait of Mrs. Andrew Reid; c. l780–1788 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, (Looks like a puddle-splashing fan, doesn’t she?)
Promenade by Meg Winikates
Misty morning meander to
the green in middle distance,
addle-pated chatter of a
governess’ persistence.
Mischief of a moment,
a jollity, a happenstance:
Puddles soak through petticoats!
The scold, the cold are
worth the dance,
to turn, to trip, from twenty
back to twelve,
to find beneath the formal figure
one’s former sense of elf.
March is over, I’m back from vacation, my taxes are filed, and it’s National Poetry Month (not to mention another round of Camp Nano)–clearly, April is meant to be a good month for writing. I actually have several projects on the front burners (going to need a bigger mental stove…), but until I have news about those, I thought I’d share one of the fun writing exercises from this week’s writers’ group meeting.
I love words: big words, unusual words, musical words, things that ring with the sounds of the cultures they came from and things that flow trippingly off the tongue like an ee cummings poem. I do not ever, under any circumstances, endeavor to write like Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway’s house on Key West, which I happened to see while on vacation last week. Photo by Andreas Lamecker, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Click for link to museum website.
Until this week’s challenge was “Write a scene using only words of one syllable.”
The universe clearly wanted to deny me my participles. This was so much harder than I expected! Hearing everyone’s results read aloud was great, though–some people actually wrote poems, others sounded poetic. I feel like an insistence on such short beats in my own writing makes even the most expressive reader sound like one of those robotic voiceovers, but judge for yourself!
“Is this the way to Fraggle Rock?”
It was dank and gross down here, with hints of sound that made Beth jump and Dan scrunch his nose and hitch his bag up his arms with nerves. I thought it was fun, but those two knew I was weird years back. They were friends with me still, so I guessed I was fine in the end. I hoped they would think my find was as cool as I did. I shone the light right at it and watched it suck it up like a black hole.
“It’s a hole,” Beth said with a sniff. “A hole in the wall. So what?”
Dan looked at it and walked a few steps more. His light was on it too.
“There should be dirt here,” he scuffed the floor in front of it. “Or mouse tracks or a bunch of bricks. It’s just black. Do you see roots out there? Or rocks?”
Beth hid all but her head in Dan’s shade. “No,” she said. “I can’t see much at all.”
“That’s ’cause it’s a worm hole to a strange world,” I grinned.
“Is not.” Beth scowled. “Must be a bear cave or some such thing.”
“No rocks, no dirt, no tracks.” Dan said once more.
“So….” I drawled. “Who’s with me?”
Beth shook her head. “I’ll hold your light, if you want. That’s it.”
Dan looked at the tool bench on the next wall. “I think you’ll want the rope,” he said. “So we can pull you back.”
Beth was five feet max and he was six, but I was the weight of them both at once. Dan was the smart one of us, for sure.
“Deal,” I shook his hand and grabbed the rope. When I passed him the end not tied at my waist he grasped me by the arm.
“Be–” he said, and I stopped him.
“I will,” I said. “See you on the flip side, man.”
“Dork,” he said. And pushed me through.
– – – –
I felt like I fell for a year, but I think it could have been ten. Or just a sec, but dark and the rush of air are not friends to time. When I hit the bed I sure yelped, though, like a poked bear. The girl yelped too – and then she hit me with a book, or maybe it was a lamp.
All I knew was, it hurt. And I had been right about the worm hole.
How about you? What do you say happens next to the intrepid narrator in words of only one syllable?
R2D2 mailbox from the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. Photographed in Boston by David Heiniluoma, Jr.
Despite the eternal frustration that is slow postal delivery to my neighborhood in Salem, I really love getting snail mail. There’s something really exciting about opening up the box and seeing a postcard or a letter that a digital inbox just doesn’t convey. Maybe that makes me a temporal leftover, but apparently there are a lot of people that feel the same way, one of whom is an author I admire, Mary Robinette Kowal, whose Glamourist Histories I read with great glee.
A few years ago, she started the Month of Letters challenge, wherein participants mail one piece of actual mail every day that the post office is open, for the entire month of February. It corresponds (ha!) perfectly with a month in which one would potentially be sending valentines anyway, and is a nice manageable month if one isn’t running February school vacation week programming. (Which I am, but oh well.) This year, she upped the game by offering to write a character letter back to anyone who wrote to either of her two main characters from the Austen-era Glamourist Histories, and that’s what made me decide to go for it. I probably won’t manage a letter/postcard/package a day, but there are a few people with whom I do keep up a written correspondence, and I’ve owed a few of them letters anyway (looking at you, Devlin!). Because who can turn down the opportunity for a letter from Jane, Lady Vincent? Not I.
(This is a brilliant idea, by the way, and crazy generous of her time and attention. I’m impressed.)
So if you’d like a letter/note/postcard/light shippable curiosity from me, drop me a line here and let me know! (If I don’t have your address already, you can leave it in the comments, which will be screened so it doesn’t go public.)
Sea Dreams and Time Machines 